


I will always hold you close, but I will learn to let you go

by angel_deux



Series: we should kind of forget about season 8 [4]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, canon divergent from The Long Night, jaime is conveniently unconscious for most of this, namely: i want her to live, not a ton of plot to this tbh, not anti-dany but also not pro-dany either, season 8 AU, very thin reasons for keeping missandei in winterfell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-07 15:30:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20819618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_deux/pseuds/angel_deux
Summary: Jaime is gravely wounded in the battle against the dead. When he thinks he's dying, he kisses Brienne.After, he heals, kept asleep with milk of the poppy. Brienne worries about what will happen when he wakes up.





	I will always hold you close, but I will learn to let you go

**Author's Note:**

> I don't really know how to preface this one. i wanted to write a quick one-shot from Brienne's perspective, since most of my Season 8 AUs are from Jaime's, but then it turned into 12k and I stubbornly refused to break it into chapters, so here you go!

These past few days and evenings with Ser Jaime beside her have been confusing.

Confusing for many reasons, but primarily confusing because of the softness with which he speaks to her.

They have always argued. Not surprising, given how they started. But even once they became friendly on the road to Kings Landing, and even when they were _back_ in Kings Landing, it was always easy to get prickly. Jaime never knew when to shut up, and Brienne was never slow to insult him in turn, desperate to keep up with the Kingslayer in all things. It got tinged with affection the longer they knew each other, but it was never anything like this.

He watches her when she trains. He watches her at meals. His eyes find her every time she enters a room, and he always rises to his feet to greet her.

He compliments her. He laughs with her instead of mocking her. He _knights_ her, and he smiles at her afterward, and there is something in his eyes that—

_No_. She’s not the same foolish child she was when Renly offered an ugly girl a dance and a few smiles and she decided it was enough to signal love or interest or even genuine care. She has come to terms with her place as a friend in Ser Jaime’s life, and she is grateful for the kindness and the gesture and the fact that he believes her worthy of knighthood. That’s more than she ever expected to have, and she’s content with this tenderness between them before the end of the world. A gentle regard, even if it’s less than what she would truly wish for.

_You love him_, the queen said, the only time Brienne spoke to her. It had somehow shocked Brienne despite the truth of it; she had done so well in fooling even herself into thinking that she cared for Jaime as barely even a friend. Someone she had developed some small affection for, simply because she was forced to spend so much time with him when they were trapped in a horrible situation. But no. She knew immediately when the queen spoke. Cersei had the right of it, and Brienne loved him.

She loves him still. His gentleness in those too-short days at Winterfell as they wait for the army of the dead only makes her heart softer, and she isn’t sure she wants that. She prefers the insults and the bickering and the deeply buried affection, because her love can exist safely in a place like that. It can’t exist safely when he looks in her eyes the way he has been, or when he bows his head and calls her _Ser Brienne_ with that small smile, filled with pride.

* * *

When the dead arrive, Jaime and Pod are at her heels. It isn’t that Brienne is afraid. Of course she _is_ afraid, but it feels inescapable. Inevitable. They will all three die tonight.

They will all three die tonight, and she loves them both in such different ways, and she knows she will fight until she cannot physically lift her sword if only to buy both of them more time. It’s a righteousness blazing inside her, and it chases away the darkness of her fear.

Jaime is at her side when they get into formation, standing before the open plain of snow. Everything is quiet. Men around them murmur to one another, and Brienne thinks that surely the army of the dead should make some louder noise as it marches, but all ahead is black silence. She turns and finds Jaime’s eyes. He has been watching her.

“Brienne,” he says. His voice catches on itself, and he shifts closer. “I wanted to say…” He’s gazing up at her. In all her dreams of him, she is always looking up at _him_. She shrinks herself in dreams to be of a height that might please him. Her features become smoother, more elegant, more like his. She wears dresses and looks well in them. It’s so unfair to die like this beside him. Her ugly, brutish self. Jaime’s hand flexes at his side, and he breaks the gaze. He looks away, down at his gloves. “I’m glad I’m with you. Here. I’m glad I came.”

She makes a sound that must be a laugh, though it doesn’t much sound like one. It is too shaky and scared for that. When he looks at her again, he wears a lopsided smile.

“I’m glad as well, Ser Jaime,” she says.

“Jaime,” he says. “Just Jaime.”

It is a sincere request, delivered quietly, and so she nods.

“Jaime,” she says.

* * *

The battle. She hardly thinks at all during the battle. There’s no time for that. She swings her sword. She charges. She retreats. She shouts instructions that she understands the sense of only after she has shouted them. She fights. She fights. She fights. She uses her sword and her hand and a shield she picks up from a dead boy who looks far too young to have been fighting and certainly too young to die like he did. She uses her boots, kicking wights into the fires that have been started by the dragon queen and the red woman. She screams wordlessly, terror and fury and determination. Her throat is raw and broken, and she can hear Pod and Jaime beside her, and she always keeps at least a tiny corner of her mind occupied with making sure they are all right.

She isn’t sure how she ends up so far from him, but in one moment she is just beside him, and then she hears him shouting from across the battlements, and she has to fight her way around them, back to his side. It’s terror, consuming terror. She has no idea where Pod is. She can only barely see Jaime beneath the wights. She saves him. She stops them. She and Jaime fight back to back. It’s better than those dreams of kisses and softness between them. It is _them_, and her brutish body is made for this. She would not change a single thing.

She turns to face him, and he cries out and lunges past her to take on some foe that has gotten behind her. She strikes out and saves him from the same. And then it is silence, and there is a moment on this battlement to rest, and she starts to smile at him. Crooked and exhausted and _alive_, and she is so happy that he’s still standing in front of her. He’s smiling too. He takes a step towards her.

But. He stumbles.

He looks surprised when he does it, and his golden hand presses against his side. Brienne tries, but she cannot see the wound. There’s too much blood on him. He’s drenched in it. She sees it trickling from between his golden fingers. Falling to the broken stone.

Jaime stumbles again, and she lurches forward to keep him from falling. His sword clatters to the ground, dropping from his hand, and she wants to scream at him to pick it up. Is he _mad_? But his knees go next, and her hands are bruising on his arms, trying to keep him on his feet. She isn’t strong enough. He falls.

_In a battle like this_, she thinks, _a man who falls will not get back up. _

“No,” she hears herself say. She’s still holding his arms, and she is down on one knee just as she was when he knighted her, but he doesn’t look down at her now. He looks up, hunched over in pain, on his knees in front of her. His breathing is labored.

“I didn’t realize,” he says. His left hand fumbles as if numb and finds hers on his arm. His fingers scrabble against her skin, so she flips her hand and squeezes his fingers, and he breathes out a sigh. He reclines back against the pile of corpses behind him as if taking a moment to rest, but she knows it for the resignation it is.

“Get up,” she says to him, and he laughs.

“I didn’t even feel it at first,” he says. “I felt it when they took my hand. You remember.”

His voice is eerie, calm, but there’s an edge of desperation creeping in. He squeezes her hand tighter. He looks at her. His eyes roam her face like a man trying to read as fast as he can.

“I remember,” she tells him.

“You were there,” he says. She doesn’t know why.

“I was there,” she repeats. Her fingers are going numb in his hand, and her knees hurt from kneeling, and her arms are weighed down, heavy, her shoulders on fire from the pain of lifting her sword and swinging it over and over again. So many times. All for nothing. She couldn’t protect him.

The battle did away with those aches, but they’re back now, and she’s not sure she can stand. Jaime is breathing fast, and there is a look of confusion on his face. She finally sees the place where his armor has been pierced, and she bends closer so she can move his golden hand aside and cover the wound with her free fingers. She feels the blood, hot, oozing past her hand, and Jaime hisses when she presses harder.

“Brienne,” he says. She shakes her head. She knows that tone.

“No,” she says. “You must get up, Jaime.”

“Brienne.” Faint and almost chiding this time, a small smile on his lips. One corner of his mouth lifted. She’s so close to him. Too close for him to die like this. She can’t do this again. Bad enough with Renly, but compared to what she feels for Jaime, her feelings for Renly seem wilted, faded. _You love him_. Cersei’s voice. She was right. What would Jaime’s sister say if she saw Brienne’s expression now? _You’ll never forgive yourself for losing him._

“Jaime,” Brienne says, a plea. He shakes his head again, and he releases her fingers at last, only to reach up and capture the back of her neck. She lets him. She lets him pull her down to him. She lets him kiss her. She kisses him back. She keeps her hand on his side. His wound. _Please, let him live. He kissed me._

He loses the strength to hold himself up, and he falls back again. A sigh escapes him, and he laughs a little. Soft. He tasted of blood and salt, and the taste remains on her lips. Burning.

“Was it your first?” he asks.

There was a boy in her household, when Brienne was eight. They wanted to see what it was like.

“Yes,” she lies. “My only.”

“Your only,” Jaime says, wonderment and awe and a hundred, hundred other things in his voice that she would have died to hear before now, before this. He lacks the strength to do more than shift, trying to sit up. “You’re supposed to be holding me.”

It’s petulant even as it’s faded, and Brienne thinks about Renly falling dead in her arms. It’s real, now, isn’t it? This isn’t a dream. Jaime’s dying.

She pulls him closer so she can hold him as he asks. It’s awkward among the dead. The battle isn’t over. She needs to fight. But she won’t allow them to take this one moment.

“I’m sorry,” she says, because he grimaces when she takes him into her arms. Her armor isn’t any softer than her features. She wishes she could be a gentler place to rest. He sighs and leans his head back against her shoulder.

“For what?” he asks. He sounds content. “This is what was supposed to happen.”

She closes her eyes and feels tears gathering behind her eyelids. She presses a quick kiss to his lank hair. Sweaty and blood-covered. She hardly knows what she’s doing. When she pulls back, Jaime is smiling at her. Distant. Fading.

“It’s easier now to tell you,” he says.

“Tell me what, Jaime?” she asks. His face goes open, the way it does whenever she says his name like that. He swallows.

“Why I came to Winterfell,” he says. There is a pleading look on his face. She’s seen it there before. Something that he wants. “Surely you must know.”

“You are a man of honor,” she tells him. She isn’t sure if that’s what he wants to hear, but she needs to tell him. She needs him to know. He smiles.

“It was for you,” he says. “Above everything.”

She doesn’t know what to say to that. She doesn’t know what to feel. She bends her lips to his, and she kisses him again, and she feels him smiling against her lips.

“You’re the truest knight I’ve known,” he says when she has pulled away, and then he doesn’t say anything more.

* * *

When the battle is over, Podrick is at her side, slightly dinged up but not any less alive. He finds her weeping after the dead are done, and he is weeping too. They’re hardly the only ones. Terror and exhaustion seep in, and there is as much sobbing from the survivors as there are cheers and elation.

Pod looks and sees that she’s alone, and her heartbreak must be obvious on her face, because he doesn’t ask. He only cries with her, and he embraces her when she allows it.

Brienne pulls herself together and rallies the exhausted fighters as best as she can. She puts them to seeing about the wounded, sending them to sift among their dead friends and comrades to find those still clinging to life. She sends Pod with them, because she finds she cannot be around him without weeping from relief that he is alive and from despair at what she has lost.

She goes to the crypts, then, and she moves aside dead men so she can open the door with the leader of the Unsullied, Grey Worm. The first person she sees beyond the door is Lady Sansa, followed by Lord Tyrion, and Brienne stares at him, stricken. She had forgotten. She had forgotten he was here, and she had forgotten how much he loves his brother.

“Lord Tyrion,” she manages, and he stares up at her.

“Jaime,” he finally says, and she shakes her head, and then he is weeping too.

* * *

She sees Sansa and Tyrion and the others safely inside the keep. She assists Grey Worm and Samwell Tarly and Missandei in setting up every available extra cot and blanket and linen sheet and pail for water in the Great Hall, under Sansa’s direction. She cheers for Lady Arya when Arya comes through, giddy and so young as word spreads that she was the one who landed the final strike against the Night King. She goes to her room, and she removes her armor, piece by piece. She hangs it reverently on its stand. She keeps her sword buckled around her waist. She’s afraid to put it down. She had taken Jaime’s sword as well, after she wept over his body and kissed his lifeless lips a final time. She keeps that one buckled on her other side. It feels like a vigil already. She isn’t sure it will ever end.

Only then does she allow herself to tread quietly past Sansa in the Great Hall as her lady treats Jon’s scrapes. She makes her way past Arya and the blacksmith boy, Gendry, as they hug desperately in the courtyard. She passes Grey Worm, who holds a sobbing Missandei in some quiet back hallway. She feels lips on hers. She hears Jaime’s desperate whisper.

Her legs ache as she climbs the battlements where she lost him, but they do not buckle, and she doesn’t falter. The dead are piled heavy up here, and she remembers the elation of the battle and the way she and Jaime had fought back to back, and how it felt like nothing could touch her because she trusted him to keep her safe.

Had he trusted her? Had something got past her? Was it her fault?

She reaches the top, and she moves to where she left him. There are more bodies than there were when she left, and she heaves the corpses of the wights over the walls as she digs through to find him. She loathes the thought of them falling and dying and burying him beneath them. They had been climbing over the walls again when she was finally forced to abandon him, and…

He isn’t there.

She remembers exactly where she left him, his back against the wall. She doesn’t think she will ever forget it. But he isn’t there.

Brienne is not a creature built for hope. The few she has allowed have been dashed far too many times. Even as it so briefly flares within her, she quells it. No. She held him as he died. He must have rose again with the rest. The thought brings bile to her throat, and she stays kneeling there with her fingers wrapped around the hilt of Jaime’s sword. If he rose and walked and fought, it’s a blessing that she didn’t encounter him. She also can’t hope to find him tonight. He could be anywhere within these walls.

_Forgive me, Jaime_, she thinks. She casts her gaze about as she heads slowly back towards the Great Hall. She feels as if she should be able to see him easily. Something connecting her to him. But that is a foolish notion of a foolish girl, and she shoves it away. She has no use for it.

She could sleep a thousand years, she thinks. She leaves the courtyard and enters the keep, and the purpose that had driven her back out into the cold bleeds out of her. Failed at the simple task of seeing to his body—not that she even knew what she would do when she found it. It still feels like a failure. All of it does. Failure upon failure. When will it end? She failed Renly. She failed Lady Catelyn. She failed Jaime. She has always failed her father just by existing as she is. Will she fail Lady Sansa, too?

She looks into the Great Hall. Sansa and Missandei lead those who were in the crypts in tending to the wounded, moving swiftly, row by row. Daenerys watches her people, a dazed expression of grief on her face. Arya has vanished, already sick of being lauded, Brienne assumes. Several older serving women or perhaps northern refugees have taken charge, and they have rolled up their sleeves to direct the rest. Blood stains their forearms. Their faces. There are men on every cot and every blanket. More wounded come in by the moment.

_He isn’t here,_ she tells herself. _Jaime is dead_.

She enters the room anyway, and she walks the aisle between the makeshift beds. So many of the northmen look alike with their blood-stained beards, but none of them have the shape of Jaime’s face. She sees young men, young women, all of them so _young_. Young and wounded. Wailing out for mothers or fathers or help or death. She sees stumps everywhere she looks. Arms and legs trailing off into nothing. She sees entrails. She sees so much blood. The sound of their pleas echoes in the stone room, and Brienne wants to give in to a childish impulse to crouch down in some corner and cover her ears and wait for it to end, but she doesn’t. She clutches Oathkeeper as she walks. She looks over every man she passes.

_He turned wight and moved from where I left him_, she tells herself. She imagines him blue-eyed and terrible, and she’s glad she took his blade from him when she did. She wonders if she would have been able to fight him.

_I would have_, she knows. _It would have killed me, but I would have._

She closes her eyes and takes a deep, wounded breath. His kiss still trembles through her. She can’t stop seeing him. His eyes. That panicked set to his mouth. Years ago, even, the way he wept when they took his hand from him. The brash, sarcastic, horrible man made pitiful and human and even more terrible because she cared for him, suddenly, and has never managed to stop.

He is dead now, like so many others. The battlefield outside. She _saw_ it. She saw how many died, and she saw how many rose again. To think one man’s death impossible just because he kissed her…it’s beyond foolishness.

“Brienne.” Sansa, suddenly, in her vision. Brienne stops short. Sansa looks as composed as ever, but there’s a fever in her eye that Brienne recognizes. A survivor’s look. Terror and elation at once. Her delicate hands are stained with blood already.

“Lady Sansa,” Brienne says.

“Tyrion was looking for you,” Sansa says. “He’s in his rooms. They found his brother.”

The look she gives Brienne banishes any doubts. Quiet and pleased for Brienne, though Brienne knows she has no warm feelings for Jaime.

“Ser Jaime,” Brienne says anyway, needing to know. “Is he...?”

“Alive,” Sansa confirms. Her smile is small, and a bit sad.

_Barely_, the smile says, but Brienne hardly cares. _Barely_ is so much better than not at all.

* * *

The Brienne who regarded Jaime for the past few days with confusion, wondering what he was about, would have lingered outside the door to Tyrion’s rooms, arguing with herself. She would have said that Tyrion’s information to her was a courtesy, not an invitation. She would have thought it presumptuous to come directly here and knock on the door to Tyrion’s quarters. But that’s exactly what she does. It isn’t even that Jaime kissed her. It isn’t even that she’s the one who told Tyrion wrongly that his brother was dead. It’s just her. She spent the night fighting the dead. Her capacity for worrying about those things has diminished.

Tyrion opens the door for her himself. There are two women tending to Jaime as he lays out on Tyrion’s bed, and an older man who advises them in a language that Brienne doesn’t understand.

“Daenerys sent some of her best people,” Tyrion explains.

“That was kind of her,” Brienne manages.

Jaime has been cut from his clothing, and he looks small and shriveled without it, scrubbed clean of blood so that the bruises and injuries stand out stark against pale skin. There’s a white sheet to protect his modesty, but it’s very thin, and it doesn’t do much, and the Brienne of yesterday would have blushed and refused to look at him lest she be accused of trying to see more than she should, but the Brienne of tonight just strides closer to look at his wound. It’s bad. Bad enough to kill him, surely, even though the women are hurrying to stitch it closed.

“I thought he…” she breathes, remembering the way he sagged in her arms, like a string was cut above him. “I was with him. I thought he was dead. I watched him die.”

“You were in the heat of battle,” Tyrion says gently. Reassuring her, she realizes. Caring for her even though he’s Jaime’s brother, and she’s just…she doesn’t know _what_ she is.

“It wasn’t,” Brienne says, hating that he’s being so kind to her, as if he knows what happened up on that ledge. Jaime’s lips on hers. Telling her that he came to Winterfell for _her_. “There was a lull. He…”

She doesn’t finish, because she doesn’t know what else to say. She won’t tell Tyrion that Jaime kissed her. She won’t tell Tyrion that Jaime practically demanded that she hold him. None of it will do Tyrion a bit of good, and she’s sure it won’t do _her_ a bit of good, either.

“Sam told me not to get my hopes up until he survives the night,” Tyrion says. He offers Brienne a goblet of wine, but she shakes her head. He drinks it himself instead. “I thought you would want to know. You looked…I know he means a lot to you.”

Brienne almost argues. Shuts Tyrion down. Her first reaction is always to go on the defensive.

But. She remembers the way Jaime stumbled into her arms, and she remembers the way he kissed her.

“He does,” she admits.

“Then join me, my lady, on my vigil. Or Ser, if you prefer.” He gestures with his goblet to the two chairs that are pulled close to his fireplace. Brienne nods, and she sits with him.

* * *

Brienne doesn’t shirk her duties. She attends Sansa and Arya and Jon Snow in whatever role they need her. She and Tormund Giantsbane actually work well together when Tormund is too exhausted to leer and say shocking things, so they are put in charge of the people who are assigned to collect and sort the bodies. It’s slow work, and Brienne doesn’t think the smell will ever leave her, but the bodies must be burned.

Sansa spends most of her days attending to the wounded and overseeing their stores of food and medicines, looking worried but not yet panicked about it. She argues quietly but frequently with Jon about the dragon queen’s haste to move south and take on Cersei in Kings Landing. Jon grows more steely and pinch-faced every time Sansa shows him pieces of parchment with scribbled strategy, her low voice pleading with him to listen, but he _does_ talk to his queen about it, and Daenerys _does_ agree to wait until more of their army is well enough to follow.

She’s impatient, Daenerys. She glitters with passion, but it burns. And her words…

_My throne. My kingdom. Fire and blood. My people. My birthright. _

Sansa is tense every time she crosses paths with Daenerys, and the more time they spend in close quarters, the more nervous Jon Snow grows. Daenerys is not meant to be contained, Brienne doesn’t think. She isn’t used to it, and she doesn’t know how to keep herself within the box that queenliness demands. Brienne knows all about that, but she also knows when it’s necessary, and she _worries_.

Tyrion drinks heavily and avoids responsibility for bringing Daenerys here, and Brienne sees him grow more ashen each time he discusses the future of the realm. He confides in no one but Brienne and Sansa and Varys. And Jaime, insensible in the bed in his room. Brienne isn’t sure where Tyrion has been sleeping. She doubts he has been sleeping very well.

Jaime groans and mutters and speaks while asleep, but he’s weak as he fights infection and blood loss, and they keep him sated and unconscious with milk of the poppy. It’s a blessing, Brienne knows. They’re lucky to have enough of it. But she longs for him to return.

She visits him when she can, and she sits with Tyrion and hears tales of Jaime’s big brother heroism, told through the rosy tint of a younger brother’s love. Brienne laughs at Tyrion’s descriptions of young Jaime and the ways he would play the part of the fool just to make his unloved little brother feel special.

Eventually, with enough urging, she offers up her own stories. She and Jaime traveling through the Riverlands. It makes Tyrion laugh to hear her describe how she hated him at first. She mocks him, his voice and his constant prying and his fool insistence that he was stronger than her. It’s strange to laugh with his wounded form in the bed across the room, but Tyrion looks so hungry for anything she can give him, and Jaime still might die.

Sam has been more confident, but there’s still a hesitation to proclaim Jaime completely safe, and the wound still looks hideous. It doesn’t fester, but Jaime still fights a fever, and it isn’t healing as neatly as Sam would wish. Brienne knows little enough about wounds, but she knows that it isn’t always the worst looking ones that kill.

She knows that Tyrion wonders about her. He very likely pities her. She feels a fool going to Jaime’s side as often as she does, seeing the loaded glances Tyrion sends her way, as if he can see her heart and how it pounds harder inside her chest each time she sees Jaime lying there.

_He kissed me,_ she wants to say. She wants to prove her worth to Jaime somehow, though she knows little enough what that might be.

She begins to return to Sansa’s side earlier. She visits Jaime less frequently. She avoids his brother’s questioning gazes.

_He kissed me_, she tells herself. _That’s all. _

* * *

When it’s time for the armies to leave, Brienne is relieved to be asked to stay. Sansa makes the case for the bulk of the non-fighting forces to be left behind in Winterfell to continue to care for the wounded, and Daenerys grants her permission. She and Sansa tour the grounds with Brienne and Grey Worm trailing behind. The two women still plainly dislike each other, but they speak cordially, and each listens when the other takes a turn. Daenerys praises Sansa’s ideas for expanding the emergency infirmary that has overtaken most of the keep, and Sansa thanks Daenerys for her support in allowing the soldiers to rest. They are two women at odds who will never quite respect the other’s position, but Sansa knows how to get what she wants, and Daenerys does too. They will work together as long as it continues to get results.

As they stand and watch the conversation, Grey Worm turns to Brienne.

“I want Missandei to stay,” he says. Brienne looks at him. There is worry plain on his face.

“Would she?” she asks. She’s unsure if he’s asking for permission or requesting that she speak to Sansa on his behalf or perhaps simply just trying to make conversation.

“If I asked, maybe.” He sounds uncertain. “It would be dangerous, if she followed.”

“It would be,” Brienne agrees. “I’m sure Lady Sansa would be honored to accept her company while the queen is…away. I will speak with her, if you’d like.”

Grey Worm nods, and there is something of a smile on his face.

* * *

Missandei _is _convinced to stay, and Daenerys is convinced to part with her, though Brienne hardly knows how. The two women hug in the courtyard, the queen confident and smiling while Missandei worries. Grey Worm kisses her soundly before he leaves, and Brienne looks away, tasting blood and salt and feeling the softness of Jaime’s lips on hers.

Tyrion’s expression is pinched when he says his goodbyes to Brienne. He looks hopeless. She understands. He is leaving one sibling behind so that he might be witness to the fiery death of a second.

“Please, look after him,” he says. The note of accusation in his voice speaks of confusion for her apparent abandonment of Jaime, and she clenches her jaw.

“I will,” she says.

“I don’t expect you to play nursemaid. There’s no need to look so grim. But some of the women say that it can help. Being spoken to. I’ve taken to reading him my letters.”

“Does it? Help?”

“I don’t know. He rarely reacts to me. But perhaps it isn’t my voice he wishes to hear.”

Brienne knows he alludes to herself, but it instead brings Cersei to mind. Jaime’s beautiful twin. Her elegant neck, her thin, delicate wrists. Her smirking lips and her cutting smile. Her voice. _You love him. _Brienne swallows.

“Perhaps not,” she says. It comes out only slightly miserable. “I’ll sit with him. I’ll write you if he wakes.”

“Or if he dies,” Tyrion says. Brienne frowns at him.

“He isn’t going to die,” she says fiercely. Tyrion’s smile is exhausted and a bit hollow, but it’s there.

“You know, I almost believe you might be stubborn enough to keep him here,” he says. “Tell Death to fuck off if it comes for my brother, Ser Brienne. I’ll try and tempt it with my sister instead.”

* * *

Missandei’s expertise becomes immediately necessary as the wounded heal and get energetic enough to chafe at the enforced bedrest. She negotiates, translates, soothes. She diminishes tensions just by being in the room. Sansa is wary of her when it comes to discussion of future plans for the realm, but she leans on her more for insight into Daenerys’s wounded fighters as the days pass. Her conferred whispers with Brienne and Lord Royce and occasionally Bran about her continued hopes for Northern Independence are the only things that Missandei remains excluded from.

Brienne feels an acute humiliation when both women appear one day in the door to Jaime’s chambers. They’re looking for Sam or Gilly to help them defuse tensions between the healers and a few Dothraki wounded, and they want someone to explain the treatments. Gilly is pleased to be asked, and she curtseys to Brienne on her way out, even though Brienne has repeatedly begged her to stop doing that.

Sansa leaves immediately with Gilly, already describing the problem, but Missandei lingers.

“The Kingslayer,” she says thoughtfully. “Do they know if he’ll wake?”

Brienne, still standing beside Jaime’s bed, shakes her head.

“He wakes sometimes,” she finds herself saying. “They’re able to feed him. He sometimes speaks. But he’s never sensible. He’s still healing.”

Missandei frowns, and she nods.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Sorry?” Brienne asks.

“He clearly means a great deal to you,” Missandei explains, and she smiles a bit before turning and following after the other two women.

She means nothing by it, of course, but that only makes Brienne’s shame greater. It’s obvious, isn’t it? The regard she has for Jaime. Made more obvious by her spending all her free time standing vigil by his side. Walking around with his sword at her hip. It’s Renly again.

_But he kissed me. _

It’s Renly again. A moment of kindness met with sickening devotion. He knighted her. He kissed her. He gave her a sword. He is her friend. He is her _friend_, but she has wanted. She _always_ wants too much. More than she can expect. More than she is given. Buried beneath the thick skin she has armored herself with, but that doesn’t stop it hurting.

She looks down at Jaime. He’s clean-shaven now, with only a little stubble having grown in since the last time he was shaved. His hair is longer. He looks sunken, hollow. His hand on top of the sheets curls sometimes into a fist, but now it’s open and relaxed. She sits back down beside the bed. She slips her hand into his. She had felt his desperate desire to stay when he thought he would die. The strength of his hand squeezing hers. It doesn’t squeeze now.

“Jaime,” she says, a plaintive sigh. “I can’t...”

She doesn’t bother to finish the thought. He never hears her when she talks except in those rare periods of alertness, and even then he is confused.

“Brienne,” he said, only yesterday. “Where is she?”

“I’m right here, Jaime.”

His eyes were glazed with fever and milk of the poppy, but they were desperate as they stared at her.

“Where is she?” again, stern and uncompromising. A military commander barking orders.

“Kings Landing,” she tried. Her voice stuck in her throat. Gilly had looked at her with surprise. Brienne swallowed back shame and said, “she’s safe in Kings Landing, Jaime.”

Cersei isn’t safe, but Jaime cannot know that. He had frowned, shaking his head.

“She isn’t safe there. Cersei can’t know. She can’t know.”

“No,” Brienne agreed, trying to be sympathetic. Trying to sound it, at least. “She can’t.”

Ravens fly in every day as the army approaches the capital. Cersei can’t know they’re coming. No matter how Jaime loves his sister, she cannot know. She cannot be warned.

She takes her hand from Jaime’s now, ignoring the slight return pressure of his fingers as she tugs it free. She stands. She unbuckles his sword belt, and she carries it to the desk on the other side of the room.

She leaves it there.

She avoids his room for three days, but then she goes back. She can’t help herself. It must be some kind of sickness, or some kind of madness.

_He kissed me. _

It was a single kiss. She should know better than to hope.

_You refused to hope that he was still alive. _

_He’s still alive. _

She sits by his bed, and she writes her letters at his desk. She keeps his fire warm. She pulls back the blankets to look at his wound, pleased with the way it heals. Sam visits less frequently, leaving Jaime in the care of the serving girls turned nurses who can handle it without his input. There are so many people who are worse off than Jaime.

“Another week,” Sam says once. “And we can start to wean him off the poppy.”

Brienne smiles at him, and she’s glad. She is. She’s also terrified.

She had just wanted him to live. Survive. She wanted him to be all right. But what will he say when he wakes? What will he see? What will he _want_?

* * *

Varys sends a message for Sansa, filled with updates. He writes that by the time they receive it, the siege of Kings Landing will likely have begun. Sansa furls and unfurls the scroll in her hands. She bites her lip. She says nothing of her worry because Missandei is with them, but Brienne understands. Jaime would, too, if he was awake. What will the dragon queen choose to do now that she’s within striking distance? Who will she become?

Brienne wonders what’s happening, and for the first time she regrets not going with them. She sees that same fierceness in Sansa sometimes, but she knows her lady is better off here. Herself, she isn’t sure. Jaime feels like a danger now. He’ll wake to find that he slept away his sister’s execution. _Where is she_? he had asked, and Brienne had answered: _safe_. Will he remember that? Will he hate her for allowing them to keep him drugged and _here _and away from his twin?

She sits at the desk that belonged to Tyrion when he was here last. She writes to her father, first. She writes of her knighting, and of Lady Sansa’s competence, and about how she is proud of what she has chosen. She writes of Jaime falling in battle, and she writes that her friendship with the Kingslayer is not what the rumors have said.

She does not write _he kissed me_. She feels it on her lips.

She writes to Tyrion. _He is unchanged_, she writes. _But I fear what Cersei’s death will do to him. It is too late to make a difference, I know. By the time this message reaches you, it will be done. I hope that you were able to save her. For Jaime’s sake, please. Try to save her._

When she’s finished, she sends the letters to Sam through the nurse once the older woman is done changing Jaime’s bandages.

She takes the bowl of broth that the nurse hands her. Exchanges it for the letters. She closes the door, and she approaches the bed.

“Jaime,” she says, touching his shoulder. “Jaime, wake up.”

He tries to sit, as he always does, but she keeps him steady, pinning him back against the cushions, only allowing him to rise enough to eat. He looks up at her, and his confusion melts into a smile that is startling in its softness. He blinks at her, and his smile grows.

“You’re here,” he says, and the sweetness of it makes her want to sob. His expression has the dazed uncertainty of a man drugged, but there’s a wholeness to it that he has lacked the last few times.

“It’s time to eat,” she says.

He grumbles something insensible, but he manages to eat all right with his one hand. His reflex is to try to grab the spoon with his right, and he gives a weary, heartbreaking sigh when he remembers, and he tucks the stump back beneath the sheets and looks at her resentfully, as if she should have reminded him. She almost smiles, but she’s afraid of Jaime when he’s like this. Almost fully here.

He eats what he can, and then he shoves the rest back at her. He’s already weak and sleepy again, falling back under the thrall of the medicine. Brienne puts the bowl aside, on the table, and she moves to stand. Jaime traps her, his hand grabbing hers.

“Where are you going?” he asks. Incredulous. Hurt.

“Nowhere,” she says. Startled into lying. “I was just getting comfortable.”

He’s embarrassed now by his outburst, and he lies back down fully, sullen and red-faced. Childlike in his illness and in the drug.

“They’ve gone, haven’t they?” he asks. The look in his eyes is impossible to read. Just _intense_, the way his looks always are.

“Yes,” she says. She doesn’t tell him how far they’ve gotten. How long they’ve been gone. “I’ve been writing to Tyrion to keep him updated.”

Jaime frowns at her. Thoughtful. His mouth works. He wants to ask the question. _When did they leave_? He doesn’t. He looks smaller. Afraid, a bit.

“I’ll get a nurse,” she says. “If you…”

“No,” he says. “No, I don’t need more.” He looks at her, still. “You were there,” he says.

“I was,” she replies, thinking of his near-death on the battlements of Winterfell.

“No, in the dream,” he says. It’s thoughtful and quiet. “You were weeping.”

She wept in life, too. Holding him. Folding herself over his body as he lost consciousness. Begging him. _Stay. Stay with me._

“Not a pleasant dream, then,” she manages to say.

“No,” he says. His head is back against the pillow, and his blinking is slower. He still watches her. “I think they cut off my hand.”

“Just a dream,” she says, and he smiles. It’s lazy, almost sardonic. Almost Jaime.

“You wept like a maiden in a song,” he says. She thinks he’s trying to tease her, but he blinks again, and his eyes shut, and Brienne sits back against the chair and closes her eyes to match.

She feels scraped raw. He said nothing and did nothing that he will remember. He touched on nothing sensitive. He didn’t even _need_ to. She is so easily unmmade by him. It’s pathetic. It can’t continue. Missandei’s sympathetic looks in the doorway. Sansa’s knowing smile. Tyrion’s annoyance when she tried to protect herself last time. But she’s all that Jaime has, here. Until his brother returns, or until Jaime is well enough to go to him, she’s the only one who truly cares for him.

_You wept like a maiden_, he said. She had. She wept like a maiden in a song, forgetting herself. Loving him and feeling torn apart by her grief. Losing another man she loved and never touched until too late. A man who kissed her.

* * *

She doesn’t mean to fall asleep there, but she does. The chair that Tyrion used to sit in is comfortable even for someone of her size. Her legs are stretched out in front of her, her back against the pillowy backrest. Her arms folded across her stomach. She blinks herself awake because Jaime has gasped and sat up, grimacing, staring around the dim room with a wildness that frightens her.

“Jaime,” she says. Her eyes go to her. His head is shaking back and forth, and he’s trying to speak.

“She’s dead,” he says. He sobs. Her stomach sinks. She moves to the bed and tries to touch him, but he jerks away from her grasp and buries his face in his hand, turning away to hide it, so she will not see.

“Jaime,” Brienne says. “It was a dream.”

“It wasn’t,” Jaime says. “It wasn’t.”

His tears are bitter and more terrifying than the ones he cried when they’d hacked off his hand. Those had frightened her because he was a man she loathed who wept piteously and who made her want to offer comfort. When he was delirious with fever and she was the only one to offer solace, he would push his face into her shoulder and beg her to kill him, whispering promises of gold and sapphires if only she’d find a knife to slit his throat and end it. She was terrified of his passion and terrified of the hatred he had for himself without his sword hand. She would hold him instead, rub his back, whisper stupid platitudes that he would have mocked her for if he wasn’t so weak and needing of any kindness.

She’s terrified now of his certainty and his heartbreak and her knowledge that he might be _right_. Cersei might be dead. She might be dead, and some terrible magic may have allowed him to sense it. The great love of his life ripped from the world. The woman he followed, worshipped, adored.

“It was just a dream,” she manages. “Cersei is fine.”

“She’s dead,” Jaime insists, looking at her as if _she_ is the mad one. His face goes dark and twisted, his eyes staring into hers, and she knows exactly what he sees.

Not Cersei. No. Her features too blunt, her hair too coarse. Her nose broken. Her shoulders broad. She could list all of her imperfections and how they compared to the flawlessness of his beautiful sister, and it wouldn’t change anything.

She isn’t Cersei. She is never going to _be_ Cersei. She is Ser Brienne of Tarth, and Jaime is her friend.

She allows a sigh, and she leans forward in her chair.

“I’m sorry, Jaime,” she says. She puts her hand on his back, and she allows her thumb to stroke over it gently, soothing. “I’m sorry. It’s all right.”

She will never forget the look in his eyes when he kissed her, and she doesn’t think she will ever stop seeing the look of hatred in his eyes tonight. Hatred and confusion and disgust, like it was back at the start. Like he couldn’t figure out what she was and why she was here.

“I’ll send for Sam,” she says, and Jaime tilts his head back to look at her. The shift in his expression, from fury to vulnerability, makes her sick.

“Wait,” he says.

“I’ll be right back,” she promises.

“No, don’t. I don’t want any more fucking milk of the poppy.”

“I’ll tell him that,” she says. She’s halfway out of her seat. Jaime reaches for her, but she evades him.

“Wait, Brienne,” he says. He sounds almost himself.

Almost, but not quite, and she’s not sure why she didn’t realize it before; he wasn’t _himself_ when he was dying, either.

* * *

She doesn’t go back.

She sometimes checks on him, but only when she knows he will be asleep.

She asks Sam for updates. She pesters Gilly. Gilly glares at her, having grown fond of her charge.

“He asks for you, you know,” she says.

“He’s drugged. He asks for everyone.”

Gilly frowns, because it’s true.

“You’re the only one here, though,” she points out, and Brienne almost laughs.

Yes, she’s the only one here. Tyrion followed the dragon queen on her conquest, and Cersei never would have chosen him above her crown. It’s only Brienne. Poor, besotted, ugly Brienne. Too stupid to realize until she had already spent nearly a moon sitting by his bed like a grief-stricken lover that his kiss was one delivered by a man delirious and dying, a man desperate for comfort, a man who owed her nothing and would give her nothing more than what he already had. He had given her respect, and friendship, and a knighthood, and she had wanted so much more. But it was not owed, and it would not be given.

“I must attend lady Sansa,” Brienne answers.

* * *

The ravens pour in.

Cersei is dead, killed in the collapsing Red Keep, destroyed by the dying dragon that Daenerys rode. Two queens desperate to keep hold of their power, destroying each other in the attempt. It makes Brienne ache to think of both of them. Beautiful Cersei. Passionate Daenerys. Brienne was terrified of both of them, and she can’t say she would have chosen either to rule, but she feels a strange kinship with them all the same. Wanting more than the world would allow them. They, at least, tried to take what they wanted. Sometimes Brienne wishes…well. Maybe it’s better that she _isn’t _like them.

Tyrion writes to Sansa and Brienne both of the council that is being set up in their place: a system of government that won’t include a singular ruler. Sansa reveals to Brienne that Jon is the last true Targaryen, but he has rejected it and accepted the Stark name, and chooses instead to return to Winterfell with the rest of his family. Tyrion and Varys will set up the council, and they invite Sansa to join them, at least for a little while. Brienne dares not say it aloud, but she knows she will sleep better now that the dragons are all dead.

Missandei weeps for her lost queen and friend, but her heart is lightened when she receives a letter from Grey Worm, whose hand is shaky and whose words are as well, but who spent the long weeks on the road learning from Davos and Jon how to compose a letter to tell her that he is safe.

_Tell my brother_, Tyrion writes. _That our sister did not suffer. Her body was found among the rubble. She looked almost as if she was sleeping. _

_Tell him also that there was no swelling of her stomach. If there ever was a babe, it was lost long ago. _

Brienne tries to hand the letter to Gilly, but she refuses to take it.

“And don’t go giving it to Sam either, m’lady,” she says. “Do it yourself.”

Brienne sighs, and Sansa hides an amused grin as she spreads her own letters across the table. Tyrion, Varys, Davos, Arya, Jon. Her eyes take in all of them at once, and Brienne can already see her planning the responses. Planning the future of the realm, and the continued independence of the north.

“You should go to him,” Sansa says. “I’ll take these to my solar. We’ll ready a party to take us to Kings Landing as soon as possible. Missandei, if you need anything…”

Missandei nods, still holding her own letter and balancing on the edge of grief. Brienne leaves them there, and she stands in the hall for a moment, just bracing herself.

She knows the way to Jaime’s rooms well enough by now, and now she _does_ hesitate. She remembers that first night when he was found and she was unafraid.

_Nothing has changed_, she tells herself.

_You are a knight. You are Ser Brienne of Tarth. Jaime is your friend, and he needs to know. _

She opens the door, and she’s surprised to see him already awake and sitting up when she does. He seems equally taken aback to see her, though his eyes quickly find the letter in her hands. She approaches the bed warily, holding it out to him, but he frowns at her.

“Just tell me what it says,” he replies. “Tyrion was too much of a coward to write me himself. He wants to make you do it.”

It’s Jaime, she realizes as he meets her eyes. Truly Jaime.

“Have they been weaning you off the milk of the poppy?”

“Yes,” he says. “Clearly.”

His voice is brittle and irritated, and he’s right. She should just do it. She stands beside his bed. She doesn’t lower herself into the comfortable chair, though she wants to. She holds the letter in her hands. She remembers that Jaime gave her a sword, armored her, and sent her to find Sansa. He knighted her. He is her _friend_. It isn’t his fault, the things she has been foolish enough to want.

“I’m sorry, Jaime,” she says. She looks at the letter instead of him. “Your sister was killed in the collapse of the Red Keep. Tyrion says it was quick. Her body...she looked at peace. One of her army’s scorpions took down Drogon with Daenerys on his back, and both were killed along with your sister. The Golden Company had already been wiped out. The Lannister army surrendered soon after that. Tyrion is in charge of setting up a council to help rule fairly without choosing a new king or queen.” She forces herself to look up and meet his eyes. He’s staring back at her. She can’t read his expression. “Your brother also said…” She sucks in a sharp breath. “Your sister showed no signs of being with child. If there ever was a babe, it…I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

Jaime nods. He absorbs the blow. She can see the impact of it on his face. The way his expression closes off afterwards, shutting her out.

“How _could_ you know?” he asks. Slightly bitter. “I never told you. I left her, believing she carried my child. I wouldn’t want you of all people to know that about me.”

“Me?” she asks, incredulous. “Why me?”

“Because I’m a selfish man, obviously. I wanted you to keep telling me how honorable I am, even though I know it’s a farce.”

She can’t help but roll her eyes, and she can’t help the fondness of her expression.

“You _are_ a man of honor,” she says, and Jaime’s return expression is still wounded, but it’s gentle, too.

“There it is,” he says. “You never learn.”

“No. Apparently not.”

She sits reluctantly in the chair beside his bed, and Jaime grows less tense.

“Gilly told me you wouldn’t come,” he says.

“I had duties to attend to, and you were drugged.”

“She said you used to sit here for hours.”

“She was trying to make you feel more important,” Brienne says without thinking, and Jaime laughs. Only a little. Small and contained.

“Well, you wouldn’t want me to get the idea that you care about me,” he says. She can’t tell if he’s genuinely injured or pretending at it.

“No,” she says. She smiles. She hopes he understands. She _does_ care about him. She does. It’s too much care. She doesn’t want him to ask for any more.

* * *

Now that Jaime is awake, she stops avoiding his rooms. She was terrified to face him after he kissed her and she wept for him, but after his middle-of-the-night fury, she’s glad to have Jaime back again, and it does away with the fear. He’s Jaime again, fully himself. Irritated and prickly about being in bed and in a foul mood most of the time, but it’s him.

Brienne brings him updates from her meetings with Sansa, and she delivers him the letters that arrive from Tyrion. He never speaks to her of Cersei, and she wonders if he wants to but doesn’t feel he can. She wonders if she should speak his sister’s name first. Bring it out into the open. She doesn’t. She won’t.

Jaime has always had this piercing way of looking at her, and she can feel it now every time she looks away from him. He’s watching her. Evaluating her. Days pass. She feels herself growing skittish. Instinct, maybe. That he’s building up to something.

She’s talking one night, informing him of the things he’s missed during the day while trapped in his room. He’s walking about the chamber unaided for the first time since his injury, and she’s trying to pretend she isn’t as proud as she is. He still limps, and she worries about the scar on his side pulling too much. She sometimes remembers too sharply the sensation of his blood flowing past her fingers. But she keeps her hand on Oathkeeper to prevent herself from reaching out to help.

“Tormund,” he says suddenly, looking at her. She blinks and thinks back to what she just said.

“Yes, he’s come back to wait for Jon. He’s been helping me train the new recruits. He’s not a bad fighter. Undisciplined. Truly, I’m surprised he’s survived this long. But he has a raw strength that…”

“_Raw strength_, really?” Jaime asks. Affronted, like she has insulted him. “And you like that?”

“Like it?” she asks. “It’s useful, I suppose? I’m sorry. What exactly are we talking about?”

“Tormund’s raw power, apparently,” Jaime mutters. His voice always gets very clipped, his words bitten off, when he’s annoyed about something but trying to pretend he isn’t. She wonders if he realizes that. She rolls her eyes and starts to continue her story, but he cuts her off, turning to face her suddenly, his stump pressed against the wall for balance. “I said something, didn’t I? I said something, and it upset you.”

“What? When?”

“I don’t know. That’s the problem. What did I say?”

“You infuriate me daily. You’ll need to be more specific.”

She’s joking, but _he_ isn’t. She realizes that as his look stays tense and his shoulders square like he’s ready to fight her. He points at her when he next speaks, visibly unhappy.

“You kissed me. You wept for me. And yet when...”

“You kissed _me_!” Brienne insists. Jaime’s face folds further into grumpy dissatisfaction.

“You returned it! You kissed me back.”

“You were dying!”

“Ah, how charitable of you. Granting pity to a dying man and allowing him to kiss you. Kissing him a second time. Crying over his body.”

“You are my friend.”

Jaime shakes his head, and he steels himself further. She can see the way he trembles with the effort, and she wants to tell him to get back in bed, but she’s afraid.

“No,” he says. “I know that isn’t all. You thought I was dying, and you _wept_!”

She knows there’s no use lying to him.

“What’s the point of this, Jaime?” she asks.

“You looked at me differently before, and now you avoid me whenever you can. You look as if you want to wash your hands every time you deign to touch me. You treat coming to see me as a chore, and we had more personal conversations when you were dragging me through the woods in chains. What _happened_?”

“Nothing _happened_,” she says, because it’s true. “It was only a kiss, Jaime. I know why you did it.”

His eyes glitter with a kind of humor. That sharp-edged kind that she learned to fear when she hadn’t yet learned affection for him.

“I confess I’m eager to hear what you thought it was, because clearly it isn’t whatever I was trying to tell you.” She’s going to tell him to piss off, or get back into bed, or call for Gilly’s help if he needs it because she can’t stay here, but he isn’t finished. “Would it have been clearer if I told you that I came to Winterfell because I love you? That I kissed you because I couldn’t die without doing it?” He lets out a mirthless laugh, shaking his head at himself. “I once told Bronn that I wanted to die in the arms of the woman j loved, and I was just so pleased that the gods had for _once_ not forsaken me that I didn’t think it mattered. But I forget sometimes how you are. You’re always willing to believe the most honorable thing about me without seeing how I could possibly love you for that.”

“You don’t _love_ me,” she insists. There’s a part of her that’s terrified because the _other_ part of her wants to rejoice, and she knows it can’t be true.

“I don’t love you?” he asks, and now he’s nearly smiling. He can read some truth in her expression that she’s too afraid to allow in his. “Is that it, then? The reason you can hardly look me in the eye? You think I don’t love you?”

“Do not...” she starts, anger thickening her voice. Jaime only tilts his head.

“Mock you?” he interrupts. Even that sounds scathing, and Brienne feels horribly seen. Jaime leaves the safety of the wall and grimaces a little, but he doesn’t waver, and he doesn’t fall. “You’re always so quick to assume I am.”

“You usually are.”

“Surely you’re a better judge of me by now.”

She bites her lip, and she watches him watch it, his gaze going hungrily to her mouth. Yes, she thinks. He’s right. She is a better judge. She saw it when he was dying, and she believed it, because he didn’t try to hide it. But how could it be true? How could it be more than the fancy of a foolish little girl? It can’t be.

“You don’t love me,” she says again.

“What did I say?” Resigned, unhappy. With himself, she realizes, more than with her. “Whatever it was, I’m sure I can explain it.”

“Nothing.” It’s true, she realizes. It’s not a lie. She has to explain anyway. “It isn’t what you said. You looked at me, and I saw…” She shakes her head, and Jaime slumps slightly as if defeated, though he only stops moving when he’s right in front of her.

“Please, Brienne,” he says.

“You were upset. You dreamed that Cersei…” she trails off, and she looks at him, begging him not to make her say it. But Jaime only continues to watch her. “You dreamt that she died. You were concerned earlier in the day, when you realized that the armies had left. I hadn’t meant to fall asleep in the chair, but you were upset, so I stayed, and I…you woke in the middle of the night, and you were insisting…I told you it was only a dream. You didn’t want to listen. And I saw…” She breaks off again, looking away. Jaime’s hand cups her jaw, and he gently tries to pull it back to face him.

“Brienne,” he says.

“You were so…_disgusted_.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“You _were_. I saw it.”

“Whatever you saw…Brienne, I wasn’t disgusted. You call me a man of honor, you insist on fighting for me, but you won’t believe me when I tell you that I know my own mind well enough to know it wasn’t disgust? Brienne, I don’t remember. I don’t know. But that wasn’t it.”

His voice is soft now that he is so close to her, and she finally allows the pressure of his hand to turn her face towards him. His eyes are on hers. She had such trouble with this expression before the dead came. The soft way he looked at her. She didn’t know what to do with it.

“I’m not Cersei,” she says.

“No, you aren’t. I love you for it,” he says. Plain and straightforward, so unlike his usual impulse to hide behind snide remarks. She turns to face him more fully, and he allows her to see him. He doesn’t try to hide anything away.

“How?” she asks. “_Why_?”

“You’re the truest knight I’ve ever known,” he answers. The last thing he said to her on the battlements.

“And you would love me for _that_?”

“Among other things. If I tell you all of them at once, I’m afraid I’ll be listing them all the way through dinner, and I’m starving.”

His smile at her annoyed expression is bright. Light. He’s looking up at her, and he doesn’t seem to mind it.

“I love you,” she says. She wishes she was a softer maid, to make the utterance gentle. Instead it’s brusque, warning, like she’s expecting him to laugh at her and reveal this all to be some joke, though she doesn’t think she is.

“Do you?” he asks, grin growing.

“You _know_ I do.”

“Do I?” he asks. She fights the urge to roll her eyes only because Jaime has somehow moved closer, and his lips are very close to hers.

“You must have known for years.”

“For _years_? No. I knew you hated me at first. I thought you saw too much good in me eventually, but I never thought it was love. I thought it was pity. Friendship. I don’t know what I thought.”

“Your sister saw it.” She feels like an utter fool for saying that, but Jaime doesn’t look put off or annoyed by her mention of Cersei.

“Did she? I knew she saw something in me. That’s why I knew I had to get you out of Kings Landing. You weren’t safe from her there.”

“She told me that I loved you.”

“I’m sure she delighted in that.”

“She seemed to find it amusing.”

“Yes, she would have. She never would have imagined that I would fall in love with anyone but her, but you would hardly be the one she’d fear. She would expect me to chase some empty, young, tirelessly sweet girl. That was what she feared from me. She feared aging and fading looks. She always wanted to hear that she was beautiful. She never would have expected you.”

“I didn’t either,” Brienne admits. Jaime shakes his head like she was a fool for it.

“Are you going to kiss me or not?” he asks, sounding petulant again, and she has to laugh and duck her head. Jaime looks charmed by it when she sneaks a glance back up at him. She can’t figure out why. She kisses him anyway.

* * *

Sansa is unsurprised to see Jaime on Brienne’s arm the next morning, strolling around the courtyard. Jaime’s strength still isn’t what it was, but he wanted to be outside, and she offered her arm to help keep him steady. She expected him to be embarrassed by needing it, but instead he compliments her on her chivalry until _she’s _the one embarrassed.

“Ser Jaime, I’m glad to see you well,” Sansa says. She eyes the lack of space between them, and the lack of golden hand. Jaime’s stump is curved around Brienne’s arm, wrapped in a piece of fabric as a shield against the cold, but visible. Sansa smiles a little to see it. Perhaps he seems less Lannister without it. “Your brother has been quite demanding, asking for updates on your health.”

“You have my permission to tell him I died. The scare would serve him right for being so irritating.”

“I considered telling him you woke and had no memory of him,” Sansa says, and Jaime laughs.

Brienne feels uncomfortable between them. Her lady and her…whatever Jaime is. She still isn’t sure. She kissed him. He had tugged her towards the bed, but something had stopped him.

“We shouldn’t. Not yet,” he had said. She had been too drunk on the feeling of an actually returned affection. She’d nodded, hardly knowing what he was talking about.

“Preparations are nearly finished,” Sansa tells her. “We’ll ride for Kings Landing in three days. Ser Jaime, you’re welcome to accompany us. If not, you are of course welcome to stay in Winterfell.”

“_Of course_?” Jaime asks. Sansa tilts her head slightly in acknowledgement.

“I trust Brienne more than anyone,” she says. “And I trust Bran. They both vouch for you.”

“I do,” Brienne says, before Jaime can say anything self-depreciating. “Because it’s true.”

Jaime smiles up at her, and his arm squeezes hers just a bit.

“I’ll let you continue your walk,” Sansa says, and then she gives an embarrassing knowing look to Brienne before she turns and moves off towards Lord Royce.

Jaime laughs as they turn and keep moving toward the battlements.

“I hope I’m well enough to ride a horse. If they try to stick me in one of those carriages, I’ll likely die of boredom.”

Brienne smiles a little. She feels a particular knot of something. Sadness and resignation, perhaps.

“You’re well enough to ride, I think,” she says. “At least for a while.”

“If you rode with me in the carriage…” he suggests, almost leering up at her, and she shakes her head with a wry grin.

They take the stairs slowly. Jaime’s doing well, all things considered. The fresh air has invigorated him. Taken some of the gloom away from him that she sensed when they were in his rooms.

“Will you return here, after?” Jaime asks. “To Winterfell? Or will it be back to Tarth?”

“Lady Sansa will be staying in Kings Landing for some time to help your brother and Jon and Varys set up the council. I’ll visit my father in that time, and decide what I want to do. We’ll probably have a discussion about heirs, again. Assuming he’s found one to replace me, I’ll be free to return here.”

Jaime looks at her with amusement, and he detaches himself as they reach the top of the battlements. He looks around.

“It was here, wasn’t it?” he asks. She shakes her head and nudges him a little farther down the walk.

“Here,” she says. She hopes that the thickness of her voice isn’t too obvious, but she can tell from Jaime’s grin that it is.

“Ah, yes. Here it is. Where you cried for me.”

“You’re insufferable.”

“I just like to keep things honest between us. You wept for me. I died happily in your arms. It was quite romantic.”

“_Romantic_.”

“It would have been more romantic if I had died without ever touching you. That’s the kind of thing people love to sing about. Pure, unfulfilled love. Neither of us realizing the other returned our affections.”

“Kissing me was better,” Brienne says, and Jaime looks at her with delight. Probably that she said something so close to a joke.

“I’m glad you agree,” he says. “I knew it was the right choice.”

“No you didn’t. You were dying and wanted to kiss me.” Jaime’s delight gets even sharper, turning to something almost giddy. “You can’t pretend you stopped and gave a lot of thought to it. I was _there_, remember?”

“I don’t even remember what I was going to say. I’m so shocked I don’t have to continue to fight you on this.”

“On what?”

“Loving you. Wanting to kiss you. All of it.”

“If you’re japing about it, I’ll murder you. I trust you know that. So I have to believe you.”

“You’re funnier when you trust me.”

“I’m not funny. I’ve just grown used to you.” She can’t delay it any longer. She has to know. “Where will you go, then? Will you take the Rock? Or stay with Tyrion?”

Jaime sighs, the smile fading somewhat from his face.

“So close,” he says. “But you don’t trust me at all. I’ll be with you, of course. If you’ll have me.”

He speaks as if it’s simple.

“I know you have no love of the north,” she tries.

“I’ve come to enjoy some aspects. All the furs are quite warm. You look fetching in your cloak.”

“And my father…”

“Well.”

“I wouldn’t want him to think…”

“I know I may not be his choice for…what? You don’t want him to think what?”

“Oh, don’t make me say it.”

“I’ll say it, if you won’t. We should be wed.” She stares at him. Jaime’s nervous, she realizes. He was nervous to ask this. He’s nervous still. “As soon as possible, preferably. But if you would like to wait until we reach Tarth, of course I…”

“Jaime.”

“I know I’m not much of a prospect. I don’t know what claims I still have to the Rock, but I don’t think I want them anyway. I’m disgraced. Your father has probably heard the same horrible rumors about us that the rest of the world…”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I’ll marry you.”

“You aren’t just saying that because I cleverly brought you to the place where you almost lost me?”

He’s joking again, but with that same wounded edge. She has spent a lifetime not being enough for anyone. Brienne sometimes struggles to remember that he has spent a lifetime not being enough for the one person that mattered to him. She wants him to feel like enough now. She takes his stump in her hands, and she pulls him closer so that she can kiss him. She fought the army of the dead and lived. She doesn’t think she was ever, that whole night, as scared as she is now. Perhaps when she saw Jaime stumble. Perhaps then.

“Was that your intention?” she asks quietly once she pulls away from the kiss.

“I don’t know. I think I wanted it to be somewhere special. The castle is a ruin, and the godswood frightens me. The site of our first kiss seemed romantic enough. If we had more time, I’d do it properly. And if you want to wait for a proper wedding…”

“My father once told me that people plan their weddings as if the marriage isn’t the best part. I don’t need anything special. I’ll just be glad that it’s you.”

Jaime grins up at her. He looks younger like this, under the sunlight, even with the glimmers of gray in his beard and hair. He looks young and hopeful and _alive_. And he looks like a man who kissed her. A man who wanted to die in her arms. A man who loves her. Gazes at her in that way. She believes him.

“All right,” he says. “Why have a long engagement? I’ve already been courting you for years.”

“Not very successfully.”

“You fell in love with me, didn’t you?” Jaime points out. Maddening and pleased and looking increasingly _excited_, like he’s the one who should be shocked at the acceptance.

“Yes,” she says. “I fell in love with you,” and if he makes that same hopeful, yearning, adoring face every time she admits to it, then she supposes she will have to keep telling him. No matter how smug he gets about it after.


End file.
